Bharat Matrimony's Matrimony 2.0 Website and User Experience Issues

I am a member of Bharat Matrimony.com. Today I received an email from them saying they have launched a Next Generation Matrimony 2.0 site portal which focuses on user-experience and other enhancements. Naturally that creates a lot of curiosity with every User Experience engineer to see what is in for a 2.0 matrimonial site portal.

So I logged in and.. saw a more white-spaced but the same green themed website. Certainly there are number of improvements compared to the previous site design. The new site features good-readability (keeping in mind that more than 40% of their users would be more than 45 years old parents), good AJAX implementations to provide on-the-spot responses. Simple and clear reporting about the messages (sent and received) interests (sent and received) profile completeness etc.

Regarding user-experience, I believe this new design is much better than the previous one. Though the navigation and few other things like layout may take some time to get used to. This, I believe is a have-to-live problem with every User Interface re-designs. But I hope the time taken for understanding this new UI is very less.

I haven't gone through the site fully. But one thing I noted is, when you click on the Personalized messages, they show only one message first. To read the next or all other messages, one has to click the tiny transport links on the top right corner which is a bad usability. I have 7 messages to respond. But only one message was shown. I was searching for a navigation/action button to read the next or all messages. After a few seconds, I thought "oh boy looks like I have only one message to respond to". The user experience is worse here. A user would like to read all the 7 messages and not one message at a time. Bharatmatrimony.com should have shown snapshots of all 7 messages at a single glance here.



Anyway, hope those guys at Bharatmatrimony.com corrects this UI issue and work towards enhancing the user-experience.

- Rajesh Sundaram

Interaction Design - HSBC.CO.IN's poor button design

HSBC.CO.IN's poor button design

Today I happened to watch one of my friend accessing HSBC's web site. He was checking his credit application's status online. The User Interface looked similar like the image below.



My friend selected the DoB and promptly filled in the Telephone number. The next thing he did was.. clicked the RESET button. And whoops.. everything got reset. He got frustrated and repeated the process once again. Once finished he carefully clicked the small GO button to complete the verification.

He was apparently not happy because he ran into such incidents a few time two days ago. On that day, he accidentally clicked on the RESET button and had to repeat the process once again. Also he wasn't sure if he should click the GO button. He said that he was expecting the phrase "Submit".


Conclusions:
1. The first priority or positive action buttons should be clearly visible (probably color coded or little wider and bigger). So that Users need not keep on thinking which button should they click.

2. Reset buttons should be positioned properly. If the flow is a single-form flow then the reset could be placed to the extreme right. Instead of the word RESET, opt for "Cancel" or "Close" (in case of window).

3. If the app is a Web 2.0 app, then use the Button+Text Link pattern. Example is "Save" as button + "Cancel" as text link next to it.

- Rajesh Sundaram